They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing, over and over, over and over – but if, repeating your life in a continuous loop, and each time learning more about why you exist, you will how? Is there really progress? What if instead of dooming you to insanity from repetition, it actually saved your life?
This is the core ego cycle hero – the critically acclaimed indie game spread its roots among gaming’s greatest minds back in 2021 and had an entire audience of hapless quasi-heroes invest in its looping mechanics over the course of a few months. Developed by Four Quarters, the game has been a hit on Nintendo Switch and PC, and arrived on Game Pass earlier this month. I’ve been sunk for 20 hours, starting all over again.
Why? Because Loop Hero is a unique blend of roguelike, strategy, and RPG elements, it somehow manages to take some ingredients you know and have tasted before and combine them into something completely new. Good food, unexpected. More stuff, and archiving. Something – somehow – unique.
In Loop Hero (as you might expect from its name), you play a hero who’s stuck in a never-ending loop. But instead of the little pixel graphics at the center of the universe you directly control, you control the world around them; behaving like some old, mad god, plucking mountains from the earth, creating primeval forests at the edges of the map, Summon villages and abandoned libraries for your heroes to steal.
In Loop Hero, some ancient force has removed everything from the universe. Where there was once life, it is now blank. Your heroes remember a world, sort of, and will walk the same circular paths over and over again, trying to piece reality back into place as you reassemble what might be real around them. As your heroes grow and learn, you can add new buildings and structures to the cycle, providing rewards to your bewildered heroes and making them stronger – preparing them for the inevitable battles to come .
This is very convincing. The typical “try again” bait of the roguelikes trade, but amplified by the kind of “idle play” that makes Vampire Survivors so captivating and irresistible. Thanks to hidden plots, and the odd synergy between the various buildings you can place, the game actively encourages experimentation–who would have thought to watch vampire mansions turn ordinary villages into ransacked hells, and then upgrade them to Towns protected by counts can be so beneficial! This means that even if you know a cycle is doomed and you have no chance of getting your necromancer hero to the level needed to take on the big bad, you can start building the world in all sorts of unpredictable ways. and get various unpredictable results.
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With home base camp, you can start giving seemingly insignificant bonuses as you scramble for resources from the Void, and you can apply small (but permanent) upgrades to your heroes after each successful run, Loop Hero knows what makes idle play such a fascinating genre – and layers more cunning mechanics and tricks on top of it. As the game progresses, you start to realize that all those 1% bonuses, the way you choose to let the river flow through the loop, the seemingly imperceptible interactions between the plates…they all matter. Victory can be as fickle as a 0.5% HP boost. seriously.
You don’t have to just take my word for the quality of Loop Hero either: the game was nominated for the 2021 DICE Awards for “Outstanding Achievement in Indie Game”, “Outstanding Achievement in Game Design” and “Strategy/Simulation Game of the Year” – All Game Designers and Industry experts come together to celebrate true innovation and progress in the industry. Backed by winners like Unpacking, It Takes Two, and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, Loop Hero remains on its own – trying to piece together the world around it, only to better understand its place in this fractured universe.
Loop Hero is available now on Xbox Game Pass for Xbox and PC.
